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Over the last two days, I’ve been trying to take stock of the quick rush of new details about this emerging Trump/Ukraine scandal. It is clear purely on the basis of what is now undisputed in the record that the President and Rudy Giuliani are guilty of a criminal abuse of power and that most or all of the President’s top national security advisors have been complicit in and quite likely participated in that criminal activity.
But before we can really understand this story in any coherent way we need to realize that many of the words and concepts are simply wrong. Indeed they pack the criminal conduct and deception into the very vocabulary we use. That makes it next to impossible to make sense of what’s actually going on.
Let’s start with the “investigation.” The standard description is that President Trump’s personal lawyer Rudy Giuliani is pressing the government of Ukraine to launch an investigation of Joe Biden and his son Hunter Biden. This is a non-sequitur. As I noted last week, what’s being demanded isn’t an investigation. Trump and Giuliani are demanding that Ukraine that manufacture damaging and false information about Joe Biden, either directly or via his son. This is likely directly through manufactured evidence or indirectly simply by standing up a bogus investigation.